Holy Cross 26 - Georgetown 13

On a day when it was either raining, drizzling or waiting to rain - Holy Cross played Georgetown down in DC. It was a day when the cloud cover was so thick that you couldn't see the jets from Reagan national airport as they boomed overhead.

Pre-game I set the over/under at 45 points for a friendly bet with my buddy Eddie. He took the under and I had the over.

The first half was pretty uneventful. At 11:13 in the second quarter Crusader QB sophomore Dominic Randolph went down with an ankle injury and was replaced by junior QB Brian McSherry. For most teams losing the starting QB would be devastating but the race to be starter for the Crusaders between Randolph and McSherry was so close that nothing was lost for Holy Cross.

The half-time score was 13-0 Holy Cross and the MVP's of the first half were probably the punters. With the game fairly boring I thought it would be good to turn the attention to various trivia matters:

- Did you know that "Hoya" (as in Georgetown Hoya) come from the Latin term "hoya saxa" (which loosely means "what rocks!")? So the team mascot is basically a luck of the draw - it sounded good in Latin deal. It just as easily could have been the Georgetown Oscilas (as in "que oscila" - Spanish for "what rocks!").

- Pre-game I had a question which still hasn't been answered. What is the protocol on umbrellas and the singing of the National Anthem? You remove your hat when the anthem is played - should you also put down your umbrella to uncover your head in respect? Still don't know about that one.

- The game program talks about Georgetown and touts the following:

Distinguished professors include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former Director of the CIA George Tenet, best selling author and linguist Deborah Tannen, former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Recent visiting faculty include Grammy-winner Bobby McFerrin and acclaimed author Mario Vargas Llosa.

Talk about putting the "liberal" into a liberal arts education.

- One "politically correct" thing that kinda bugged me - the campus police at Georgetown aren't called campus police. They are called "public safety". That's a bit much. Just call them campus police. The word "police" shouldn't be a dirty word.

Georgetown has a nice little tradition. Each year they give the jersey number 35 to the top student-athlete to honor and remember Joe Eacobacci who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and who died on September 11th. This year the #35 jersey was given to senior defensive end Alex Buzbee who was the best Hoya player on defense by far. What puzzled me was the fact that Buzbee missed the entire 3rd quarter and no report on the game that I've seen explained why.

The final score was 26-13 but Georgetown was driving in the final minutes and I was rooting for them. One more score and I would have covered the over and won my bet with Eddie.

Neither the HC offense or defense did anything unusual. It was very vanilla on both sides of the ball as if the coaches had made up their minds not to expose anything that next week's opponent Northeastern could gleam from game film.